It’s a sign of the times: Many news agencies in Washington now are accepting various forms of leaked information.

It used to be that anonymous tips would come through a phone call or snail mail. Now, journalists are using apps that encrypt text messages from sources, and many media agencies are promoting secure document drops.

“If you’re trying to protect your source, in this day and age, encryption is a requirement,” saysSkylar Nagao, chief product officer with Montreal-basedPeerio. “Having spoken with many journalists, people who are aware of their high-risk sources consider it a moral obligation to use encryption to protect them.”

Encryption itself has become much more mainstream. It’s what prevents people from reading messages and essentially keeps them private.

Mashable has a senior editor with a Peerio account for just this purpose. Several folks with The New York Times also list Peerio accounts in their profiles.

These include Signal, Peerio, WhatsApp, Pidgin, Encrypted Email, SecureDrop, and Postal mail to the News Lockbox.

“No system is 100 percent secure, but these tools attempt to create a more secure environment than that provided by normal communication channels,” the Post says.

In addition to using one of the above tools, The Post suggests sources use a secure computer to communicate (one that doesn’t maintain enterprise software or malware that could record activities) and “delete trails of communication that you store on your computer, such as copies of messages or your secure codename assigned when using the service.”Tips and Confidential News Sources — The New York Times

A relative new player to this scene, Peerio has been around a couple of years. Its target mostly was business and organizational use. Peerio allows an unlimited number of files to be uploaded, and these files are entirely encrypted, meaning only you and your intended recipients have access.